


Perdition

by Maker_of_Rune_Vests



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Post-Thor (2011), Pre-Avengers (2012), Warning: Could be triggering and/or depressing, Warning: Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-02
Updated: 2017-09-02
Packaged: 2018-12-22 18:22:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11973048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maker_of_Rune_Vests/pseuds/Maker_of_Rune_Vests
Summary: Credit is due to many Loki fans--for theories and emotions.





	Perdition

**Author's Note:**

> Credit is due to many Loki fans--for theories and emotions.

Encompassed by broken bits of planet and star floating in an unordered and apparently breathless mass, far into space, I stand, and remember how I fell here, remember with utmost clarity my fall.  
He is not my father.  
He never was.  
I am thinking too much. But with nothing I know to do except watch for danger, what else can I do? I cannot concentrate upon these stars, though they are beautiful.  
When I opened my hand and fell I anticipated a long wandering in Hel. That I would be absorbed into a passage that crossed the cosmos I learned only as it happened, as I began to be whisked past stars that looked like meteors for my flying. The Bifrost and the two on it were gone before I had expected them to be. I cannot but wonder if, by the time I must have slipped from their gaze, were they still looking?  
The passage sent me skimming at last, more slowly, over a rough dark mass; and let me drop onto it. I rose and saw the suspended stones; the colorful stars and nebulae; and the distant galaxies—those which I now still watch for danger or chance. But I see nothing save stars moving beyond barren dark rocks confoundingly floating in the gap between the valued parts of the universe.  
Perhaps I’ll travel to Hel after all, given time. But doing so by passivity is not in my nature. I draw in a deep breath, take my shoulders back and my head up, and set out to learn about this place. 

∞ † ∞

The Other watched this lost Asgardian, and read his unarmored mind. A servant of the Titan Thanos whose icy inamorata was Death, The Other never used a name. He appeared much like an Asgardian, save for his bluish-gray color, a shade more morbid than that of a Jotun; and always wore a hood and long sleeves so that his cruel nose and decomposing mouth and twisting, doubly-thumbed hands were all that could be viewed of him.  
The stranger was proud, angry, ready for catastrophe; Thanos would be pleased. Less pleasing was that he possessed some measure of sentimentality, honor, and loyalty; but the sadness resulting from these combined with his rage and youth would make him easy to use. The Other crept into a memory of an old man, a metal rounded triangle hiding one of his eyes, saying, “I only sought to protect you from—“  
A barrier of what the Other perceived as a virescent florescence rippled impenetrably over the memory as the stranger turned towards him, as immediately as a boreal wind shifts direction. He was holding a dagger, and his face had changed from pensive to reservedly defiant.  
“What are you?” he asked coldly. To the Other the voice sounded contemptibly quiet and refined.  
The Other stepped forward. “My master is Thanos, the gauntlet wearer, the lover of Death,” he said. “I am the Other. Who are you?”  
The stranger’s head lifted. “I am Loki, of Asgard. What business had you in my thoughts?”  
The Other grinned and speared into—the green magic. He could not permeate it. The Asgardian’s brows drew together, and with skilled speed he pushed off from the stone and brought the Other backwards down onto it, setting his dagger at the Other’s throat. “I have some questions about this realm,” the Asgardian said calmly.  
“The Sanctuary,” The Other said, loudly.  
One of the Chitauri who appeared as the code word, the name of their master’s residence, was said, threw the Asgardian off of the Other just as the dagger poked through his corpselike skin, and had his own throat slit a second before the Asgardian rolled away from him and stabbed another of the Chiaturi to the heart, then another in the throat, and then fell as a dozen of them threw their hard grey bodies on him. 

∞ † ∞

I have been in this durance for days and nights and have been unable to count either, for there is no glimmer of light and I am fed sometimes when hungered and other times when famished. I have seen no creature…though as the Other appears as a Jotun with scurvy, and his fellow monsters as children of a union between the Destroyer and a deformed dragon, it’s rather thoughtful of them not to pain my eyes.  
This pit is as wide as I am tall, and less than twice that long, and so high that I cannot touch the ceiling. The food is lowered down, as I must have been. There is nothing in here save a hole in one corner for disposal.  
Lately I must always touch one of the walls; if I stand in the center in the blackness it seems as if I am in Ginnungagap itself, though I know this place is small and stone. I should quite enjoy casting the Other into Ginnungagap. 

∞ † ∞

“Have him bring me the Tesseract,” Thanos had ordered, thin purple lips slowly talking in his ancient purple face. “If he is still strong enough to shut you out, after a month of lonely deprivation, use all force that comes short of killing or long crippling him.” 

∞ † ∞

Remembrances are stronger than magic. I can protect my mind from everything but itself. Now, as I sit with one hand against the cool wall, I cannot stop the memories. The rare nights when Odin rather than Mother told us a tale before we slept, sitting in the light chair between our beds that was meant to suit Mother, looking out of place. “Tell us about the Frost Giants!” Thor would always say. “Mother never tells us about them.”  
“Long ago, dark creatures with ice for hearts desired to freeze all the realms—“  
No, I do not wish to hear those stories again… the most evil of monsters… I shake my head sharply. I will think of—what can I think of? All memories are torture, even those of Mother—for I know I have made her suffer, and I doubt at times if she still loves me, for there was nothing but fear in her eyes the last time I saw her—the present is nothing, the future can be nothing but worse—“he put a hand on each of my shoulders. “I hope you aren’t usually such an idiot, because you’re going to be my counsellor. You’ll always be my counsellor.”  
—I press my face into my folded-up knees, so hard that it hurts. I made the Destroyer smite him, so mightily that he fell, that he could have died, may have—he would have laughed at that smite in the old days—  
I stumble to my feet and into the center of the cell, for nothing and panic are better than these thoughts.  
Light. High above me stars, an orange planet. I squint, their light is so scintillating; and yet I remember it as pale and distant.  
A steel chain ladder clanks over the edge of the rectangle of stars, and swings as it comes to me. I do not hesitate to climb it, either for what has let it down or for my weakness.  
The Other waits for me is the blinding vague light at the top of my prison, and I trouble to hide with an illusion my near emaciation and disarray, looking at him with all the despising I feel.  
His harsh voice garbles out through his putrescent teeth. “You seem defiant, Asgardian. Yet my master wishes to offer you much.”  
“His giving me such spacious accommodation and such an…unending view made that impression upon me,” I say dryly. The Other and I are surrounded by the dragon-automaton monsters, the name of which I do not know.  
“All his wants of you is that you bring him the Stone known as the Tesseract—a Stone that can rule minds—“  
“I studied the matter of such stones, some centuries ago.”  
“If you succeed, you may ask any reward—revenge on anyone, a realm to rule, whatever you desire within reason. If you fail, you will suffer more than you can imagine.” The Other tries to push his face into mine. I lift my head, both because of his foulness and because it pleases me that he is too short to use this ploy. “If you refuse, you will suffer until you beg for death.”  
I swallow. Time to play the prince, the god. For such I am in comparison to this animal.“I do not beg for that which I may take. Nor will I serve your master for such paltry rewards as an assassination or a single realm. If he wishes to offer equal rule of the cosmos, let him come to me himself and broach it.” Not that I would still be present, should I find my abscondance at all possible.  
The Other gargles, laughing, as his fingers claw and tense, and his mind forces into mine, feeling as if his twisting, filthy fingers are touching whatever they find there. I slam the wall of my magic down on them, staring at the part of his hood that hides his eyes. Now his mind’s fingers are slamming and scratching at my wall, which for my incarceration is weaker than it was.  
Never have I done this. But I hold him out, though it is sickening and makes an ache thicken in my head, and smile as his hand shakes and shoulders curve farther in, and as in the end my magic is indeed stronger. This creature is not my equal, though he had powers—and minions. My victory is extinguished by the iron hands of multiple of his monsters gripping me, unarmed and surrounded as I am.  
I clench my hands as chains clank, but do not try to fight. I would not succeed.  
Iron clamps around my wrists and neck and booted ankles, iron linked by chains and led by one, debasement in chafing-edged metal form. I clench my teeth. If I had my will every creature that forged or applied these bonds should spend eternity wearing their replicas.  
∞ † ∞

“This Asgardian is the bastard of a Jotun king,” Thanos had informed the Other. “He will not resist burning long.”  
The Other was confounded to find that he thought Thanos might be wrong. Thanos could not be wrong. But this spare, pale Asgardian—he was no weakling, and had enough magic and tenacity that the Other felt that he would be a challenge.  
He was staying perfectly still—which he almost was forced to do, for his ankles, wrists, and neck fetters had all been clamped to links driven into stone. But the Other expected prisoners thus secured to twist, to shake their heads, to strain. This one was simply staring at him arrogantly, though tensely; his hands were fists and his jaw clamped. He had not fought being chained, though the Other had noticed the assessing stares he had given to the Chitauri and the staples.  
The Other spoke with his hooded back to the Asgardian. “So, you think you can refuse the will of Thanos? Despise his magnanimity? Mock him and his messenger?”  
“Yes, actually.”  
“Then let us learn the resilience of frost to fire,” The Other rasped, and turned, showing the Asgardian that he gripped a long metal rod with a slotted ball on the end holding flaming coals. A very slight flinch. “I…fear I don’t melt,” he said almost apologetically, definitely mockingly. “You seem to be mistaken in the nature of Frost Giants. I’m surprised you even managed to identify me.”  
“Your mind is free to me,” the Other lied, feeling his muscles tense with irritation.  
Loki sighed. “Perhaps you should have practiced your disingenuousness for a few millennia before giving it an appearance before a god.”  
“God?” The Other catarrhed. He swung his torch around so the fireless end was lifted, coldly lit by the stars and planets, and slammed it across Loki’s cheek. Loki drew in his breath, rage freezing in his eyes. “Could I smite a god so?”  
One black eyebrow went up. “You just did.”  
The Other’s decaying teeth clenched together. He had never experienced a victim so mocking, and he wished that Thanos did not want this Asgardian alive and unincapacitated. “Mock me,” he rasped. “Be proud and virtuous. You will suffer more, and in the end you will obey us. We have the might, the offensive, the advantage.” He twirled the torch around again, bringing the flaming end a few inches away from the Asgardian’s pallid face. “In the end you will serve my master and love Death, and any reward you receive from him will not be your right but will be his will, that you may be grateful and worship Death.” He stabbed the fire closer, and had the pleasure of seeing the Asgardian press his head back against the rock. “Will you obey and be rewarded, or resist and be wreaked?” The fire moved closer. “Swear to seek Thanos his Tesseract today—and you will be held to that pledge. If you swear and then seek to escape, Thanos will rouse himself, smash and reform your mind, and force you to do deeds too black for you to think of now. Will you swear?”  
The Asgardian smiled joylessly. “I’m not one who forswears myself. Nor do I feel inclined to be a spiritless weapon.”  
“You think you have hope or power or a choice?” The Other coughed into his face, grabbing it in his dirty hand, forcing the Asgardian’s head to stay against the wall as he seared the flames across his high forehead. The Asgardian gasped, eyes watering, and in that moment of pain the Other ravaged into his mind, snatching all the debasement and humiliation that he could find, to use against this resistor.  
He took a step back, stared as the Asgardian tried to surmount the pain of fire and rapine. “Remember that you are alone, and none will find you—if any would seek a bastard traitor,” he gravelled, and motioned to the Chitauri to take the Asgardian to his new cell; not the old one, because now the Other meant to keep him in fetters, and those would have made extracting him from the pit difficult. 

∞ † ∞

I wish that I had died before I ever fought my brother, died as soon as I learned of my blood, by my dagger in my heart or across my wrists. Except that I should not wish my mother to have seen my death….  
Now my wrists pain as though I had indeed slit them, fettered as they are, clamped together and chained to an iron ring in the wall of my new cell, just as dark as the old one, and by virtue of my fettering smaller. I pace, arms pulled by the invisible ring in the wall at the end of every curved path.  
Two days, I think, since the Other burned me. The throbbing burns feel like the wound of where he tore in and tore out of my spirit.  
He devastated my mind like a man forcing a maiden.  
He, foul, bestial, knows more about my soul than those I love or have loved ever would have.  
The chain pulls my wrists to my side, and I turn and walk back again in the lightlessness. He told the truth when he said that I was hopeless, powerless, choiceless, alone, unfindable. But that he lied when he said that none would care to find me, I hope.  
I try to keep imagining my mother searching, pacing as I imagine, trying to think of nothing but her standing by the fire, casting in rosemary for remembrance, eyebright for sight, leaning closer as planets and realms appear in the fire—fire….  
Even these thoughts end in flames and grief for making her weep, for I cannot imagine her searching without seeing a tearstain down her cheek, a tearstain like the one she had when searching for Thor—that time when the idiot was only missing because of becoming involved in a Dwarfish party with too much mead, but some magic-mad Alf reported that he’d fallen down a glacier….  
I never thought, before the time of revelations and exiling and desperation, that I should ever make my mother weep. Nor would I have doubted if she would care to find me. 

∞ † ∞

“Let me show you what Thanos craves,” the Other rasps, gripping my arm as we stand on a great rounded asteroid. I think of strangling him, but too many of the Chitauri are circumscribing us for that to be possible. I feel his mind hold my thoughts—and then for the first time another mind swallows us both, an ancient, morbid and sadistic fount of power.  
And then I am in a Midgardian laboratory, with no sign of The Other, but still the feeling of the two minds about mine. I look down and do not see myself, nor do I feel the floor beneath my boots as I walk forward—walk like someone who is not chained. I hypothesize that my spirit is here and my body is not, as I follow an elderly Midgardian man who walks by, looking serious and ill-attired.  
He meets another Midgardian, with dark skin and a missing eye (some strange conglomeration of Heimdall and Odin?), who opens a box and reveals a cube shining with the blue light of infinite power. I have seen this in more than one volume; a small painted blue square, with the bright blue lines meaning light shining. Worse than Ragnarok could be made with this; it must for all time be separated from Thanos—an Asgardian palladium and weapon, which ought to be in the treasure vault. I have long wished to see it, and do not feel the minds of the Other and Thanos as I look at it and desire it. The elderly Midgardian looks at it uneasily.  
“I guess it’s worth looking into,” I suggest to him, using the low Midgardian vocabulary, and he repeats it aloud, ignorant that he is parroting an Asgardian. It is only then that I realize it was not my idea to give him those words, though they echoed my thoughts—that one of the minds around mine thought of it—and I am standing on the asteroid, angry enough to strangle the Other regardless of the Chitauri, were not several of them already grasping me.  
“The old man was Erik Selvig, a friend of your brother’s,” The Other tells me. “You see how easily he is used, and how the Tesseract is claimable.” He turns away, cloak limp.  
“Is it the elderly Midgardian or the one-eyed one whom Thanos fears to meet?” I ridicule. “Or perhaps he is too slothful to journey to Midgard.”  
The Other snarls, “Thanos is not insulted in the Sanctuary!”

∞ † ∞

This is the place where I was burned; this time they have torn off my upper raiment and are linking me to the staples with my face towards the stone. If I had even a chance of getting away or of being only killed, I should fight; but these multitudinous Chitauri and mind-ruling monsters want me alive and captivated, and will keep me so.  
I hate my flesh being exposed to these monsters, being bound helplessly. Shrinking chills run down my back—chills, though I am a Jotun—as the Other thoughtfully touches me. “Scrawnier than I expected,” he says, scratching his fingernail into me. It is not possible to put the Other in an ill frame of mind, but I only wish I had been as successful in ruling as I was in embittering his temper today. It would seem that insinuating that Thanos is slothful brought—  
“Ah!” I gasp as something slashes across my back. I clench my teeth and am silent as another slash strikes me, and another, and many more. My heart is pounding as if to direct blood out of these sudden orifices. Another, another, can I hope they—another, another—mean to kill m—anoth….  
I am lying on my face, arms pulled by the chain the connects me to my cell wall, and the Other is standing beside me, the hem of his dirty cloak against my shoulder. “I could see your bones before, Asgardian, but this really has improved matters,” he says. I turn my head away, which makes a slash across the back of my neck stab me. “The blood is covering them somewhat.”  
“Go to Hela,” I whisper.  
He cackles. “That might be better,” he says. Then quiet—and then the twisting fingers in my mind again. I am weary, but I yank down the barrier like a dying warrior axing a foe.  
It is shattered, the tears across it like the ones woven on my back, and it dissipates, and it has no restoration.  
And then I feel the fingers release, and sense that the Other’s master requires him. He leaves.  
I cannot move, and feel the blood slowly pooling and spreading. This would have killed a Midgardian. It will not kill me.  
A few hours ago I would have wished that it would. But now I demand to live to see the Other a thoughtless heap, tortured mind and body; the Chitauri, corpses; Thanos the Death-lover screaming for mercy that he not die, and the blood of all of them pooling around my feet as my own blood pools around me now. That would be sweet.  
I clench my teeth and drag myself closer to the wall I am chained to, and then I sleep for exhaustion.  
Flames are between me and a room, and I draw in my breath. But I do not feel them, or my flogging, and I seem to be standing—oh. I see Mother and Thor beyond the flames.  
“Have you seen any indication of him?” he asks.  
“None,” she answers sadly. “At times I fear he may be dead, as your father believes.”  
I see Thor’s face, and I know that he believes it too. I cannot tell if he mourns or not.  
“You will keep looking,” he says quietly.  
“For the rest of my life, if need be.” Mother looks older than she did the last time I saw her…with shock on her face, fear in her eyes….  
Thor embraces her, and walks toward the door with the heavy unstoppable walk I remember well. He pauses. “Father will not learn from me that you are still looking.”  
Mother nods, and he vanishes. She runs her hands up over her forehead, over her up-pinned red-gold hair, and turns back to the fire. Her eyes widen, and she exclaims, “Loki! Where are you?”  
“The Sanctuary,” I say, speaking quickly. “Far across the cosmos, beyond the galaxy Ymir’s Hair—“ I can see that she is not hearing me. “The Sanctuary, Thanos’s Sanctuary,” I say louder.  
“I cannot hear you, my son,” she says, tears gathering in her eyes. I can think of no signs that would express where I am. She leans closer to the fire, looking at me like she would after I came back from battles and she was worried that I had been wounded more than I would admit, with no anger in her eyes. It is to be hoped that in her vision I am less bloody and more clothed than I actually am….  
I smile through the flames at her, longing to be in her arms. “I love you,” I say, and she must have understood that, for she says it, and says it again, leaning as close as she can—  
And I am lying in my blood in a cell in the Sanctuary, and beginning to weep so unboundedly that it racks my wounds and almost suffocates me.

∞ † ∞

“Months here, I cannot remember,” I say aloud, flinching even from speaking—my most recent flogging was, perhaps, two days ago. “Floggings, three; burning, one; branding, one; half-starvation,….pain courtesy of the Other’s mind, unpleasant memories from the same…isolation, incalculable. Nightmares….” And debasement that I refuse to admit I remember truly.  
Counting to remain sound of mind would perhaps be more efficacious if I counted something else, such as the famous goats in Asgardian history.  
At any moment the Other may tempt me again, and then threaten me, and then torture me with memories and pain and shame. I have three times healed enough to bar him, and each time I have been flogged or branded. It’s flattering that they’re going to so much trouble with me instead of simply compelling someone else to bring Thanos the Tesseract.  
I would have long ago brought him the Tesseract, pride or not, wrecking of the cosmos or not, were it not that Asgard would be in peril if he had it. I am beginning to forget (how contemptible I once thought forgetting was!) how gold looks shining, and the sound of illuminated pages being leafed through; I rebuff reminiscences of Odin, and sparring with my brother, having him not understand my jests, and all the times when he said he should have listened to me, and the times he protected me—for I know he can never forgive me; but I still remember my mother, and I will never put her or the people of whom I was the king in danger from this morbid Titan. 

∞ † ∞

The Other leaned back against a stone and thrust his voice into the Asgardian’s mind. “Why will you not obey?” he asked. “Surely not for honor. Honor means nothing after so much torture.” Silence. Now and then the Asgardian would refuse to answer, which simply meant that the Other tortured him without having a conversation first. “Why do you resist? Pride?”  
The Asgardian’s voice, still refined. “Hatred alone.”  
“That would not protect you, liar,” the Other rasped. “Oh, I know you hate, but I have seen your pathetic love; I have seen your clinging to your code—what code? You betrayed your brother, treacherously murdered your father, doomed your mother to millennia of hopeless searching.”  
Silence.  
“You will yield,” the Other said. “I was like you, two millennia ago.”  
“You are nothing like me.”  
The Other laughed. “I fought Thanos for two years. Why do you think I am disfigured and hooded? I was beaten and frozen and branded, until I loved pain and death and loved the master of them. You will surrender.”  
The Asgardian, actually interested. “Who are you?”  
“I was—“ The Other could not remember, and rough rage filled him. “I am nothing but the Other.” He flared his long-ago racked hands, viciously forcing the memory of Loki’s brother’s sad, lied-to face into the Asgardian’s thoughts.  
“Indeed,” said Thanos’s voice. “Be glad you are that, even.”  
The Other knelt, looking up at his master as his throne poised some three feet above the asteroid on which they were.  
“You have one more chance to break this Asgardian, and if it fails, I will do it myself, and you will suffer for your unprofitability. Do you understand?”  
“Yes, my lord.” The Other bowed his head.

∞ † ∞

“Let me remind you what a fool you are to keep fighting,” the Other rasps, gripping my arm harder than the fetters do as we stand under the planets. I sense that he is perturbed. “You are fighting for nothing.” I see like a memory, though it is not one, Asgardians lauding my brother for defeating me, the evil Jotun-descended prince who usurped the throne and destroyed the Bifrost. They smile and lift fists into the air, pale in front of Asgard’s planeted sky; they pound backs, and maidens look at Thor as if he were king of the nine realms. “This is how they took your death,” the Other says. “Why should you protect them?”  
I do not answer. A contrivance, possibly; it is not of consequence. The asteroid seems to be undulating. I have not been able to sleep since my last flogging.  
“Or do you aspire to make your father proud?” The Other impresses his twisted fingers. “Don’t think I don’t know that what you are sick for is his considering you worthy— sentimental child.”  
“I have no father.”  
“But you have a mother, who would rather have you home alive than have you tortured to death or darker. Can you tell me she would not trade the cosmos for her son home? I have seen her in your mind--”  
“You have no right to see her or speak of her, monster,” I say softly, ripping my arm away from him. “Or to attempt to guess at what she values. Are theories about those who are or never were my parents all you have for me today?”  
His teeth appear in a smile, and a memory rips into my mind.  
Thor and Father are both above me, alike in their looks and armor and accordance with every true Asgardian ideal, for the ideals and Thor were both formed in Father’s image. I grip Gungnir’s end tighter, speaking to Father, hoping that he will understand how close I had come to the success he would have praised; so close, despite betrayals, that I would have had success if it had not been for Thor. So close to winning what I had been pledged every day of my life until that of Thor’s coronation—the throne of Asgard.  
“I could have done it, Father! For you, for all of us!”  
I see even less mercy in Thor’s face than in Father’s, and Father looks at me as he looks at those whom he sentences to the axe, sadly but without devastation.  
“No, Loki.”  
And Thor, caring as little as he would for any other Jotun monster, heaves me up, holds me by the throat, and does not even look at my face when he tosses me into the abyss.  
“That never—never happened.”  
“Are you certain?” The Other asks.  
“You contrived it, monster!”  
“Do you really trust your mind?” No. “And you never were his brother, after all, any more than you were ever the son of any being except the Jotun you murdered as an ineffectual blood-sacrifice to your pathetic thirst for worthiness. ” The Other smiles. “I know you and your history better than you know them, Laufeyson.” Again the throwing away runs through my mind, down to the blowing of two red capes as Odin and Thor turn away before I am out of sight.  
I do not trust my mind.  
“That never happened!” I shout, tears coming to my eyes, and throw the Other down, strangling him, careless if all the Chitauri in the Sanctuary slay me. His twisting hands tear at the minimal flesh that is on my arms, and his hood leaves a face that has been burnt and branded until I cannot know what race he is of, with bulging eyes and a tongue starting to protrude; and the memory of my tossing away repeats again and again in my mind, but fainter and fainter as I am obliterating his.  
He flies out of my hands, smashing against a standing rock, and I am overshadowed. I stand. Before me is a levitating throne, and on the throne a Titan, ice-blue-eyed, scars striping his lengthy purple chin. “Thank you for chastising him,” he says. “He will have no power until I choose.” The Other groans.  
Almost unbearable heat rushes out from Thanos and surrounds me. “Why would you die for freedom from me?” he asks, almost gently. “Know you not that that there is no freedom?” I take a step back, and am dragged forward by his magic, cancelling my movement. “We all are slaves, to greed or religion or oaths or desires, to abhorrence or love. If a being were not enslaved to any of these, he would be his own slave, worrying for himself, feeding himself.” Thanos sighs, and it seems as if more heat comes from his mouth. I can see only darkness and glimpses of his purple face and small lights, for the heat is too much. It is evaporating out my life, and I wonder when I commenced trembling. “I have chosen to be the slave of Death, for freedom is life’s great lie, yet death’s great truth.”  
I struggle not to fall on my knees or face. I can see nothing now. Is this the end? Cremated alive by a philosophical Titan, wondering with my last thoughts whether or not my brother tossed me here?  
I was ought to have learned to be less sanguine. Just as I fall, bony knees against the frying stone, Thanos fills my mind with more pain than I have ever had--I know nothing but that, until after a moment I hear myself screaming and know that the pain is a mere symptom of his twisting my thoughts, metamorphosing memories, editing emotions, annihilating hopes.  
He has departed me, and the heat is gone, and I kneel with my head bent, looking at my chained hands and the four bleeding wounds in each of my palms.  
“Look at me,” Thanos says, sounding tired. I lift my head, and hate him. “Who are you?”  
For a moment I know not, and hate him. “I am Loki of Asgard,” I say, and hate him.  
“Tell me truthfully how you came here,” he says.  
“I was King of Asgard, and I was betrayed. I fought with Thor, and he tossed me into the abyss.”  
Thanos nods. “And you will bring me the Tesseract, and I will give you a realm to rule, and you will be grateful to me.”  
“I will,” I say, and hate him.  
“Later, you will swear to bring it to me. I wish you to know what you are swearing. Heed me; I prefer intelligent servants, but if you do not swear, I will do this to you again and again, as exhausting as it is for me, until you are far less than the Other.”  
The Chitauri carry me back to my cell. I cannot walk.

∞ † ∞

I can stand now, and know who I am, and know that I will never bring him the Tesseract; but to no longer be an ant under the feet of these monsters, I will forswear myself and kill. I will promise Thanos that I will bring him the Tesseract (and if I read him aright, he will not take the effort of reading me to see if I mean this—his laziness is his weakness), and will be given a realm as reward. Not Asgard. I do not know what all Thanos did to my mind, but I still remember Mother, and a bridge many-colored over clear water, leading to a golden citadel, and would gladly suffer out my millennia in this place before I would chance Thanos clutching them.  
No, I will invade Midgard, and the brother who cast me into this perdition will come and indisputably, even to Thanos, triumph over me, and take me back to Asgard and the axe. Better to die in Asgard than to live in the Sanctuary.  
But not before I have made him feel pain and fear. Not before all who stand against me are mown down by the chaos of a god, and so many have knelt to me that I can forget my knees were on the stone before Thanos and my head bent to him. Not before I have proven that I am a god capable of ruling a realm.  
…Not before my hands are rushing red with blood, and Midgardian mothers are sobbing for their sons—I know this, I know this….  
Do all monsters hate their monstrosity?


End file.
